helping victims

This January the Tor Project is supporting the Central America Domestic Violence Hackathon. The goal of this effort is to address the challenge of domestic violence by building technology solutions to assist agencies that work to support victims and advance efforts to bring perpetrators to justice.

This is being done by supporting communities on the ground in six Central America countries and Washington, DC. Already some of the organizations involved, including SecondMuse and the World Bank, have worked with these communities to define problems with potential for technical solutions. Next, these problems will be refined and then hacked on at a series of coordinated hackathons on January 26th and 27th, 2013.

We want to invite the Tor community to join us in this process. How can you help? There are two ways:

Join the collaboration around defining strong problems. You can do this by reading the problem definitions and adding your comments, questions, and ideas. These problems have been generated primarily by non-technical organizations and your insight from a technical perspective can be invaluable. This includes feasibility, use cases, privacy and security concerns, existing solutions, and more.

We believe we can make a difference on domestic violence, and we need you.

Finally, if you'd like to get involved on a deeper level by organizing a problem refinement event, meeting with organizations in these locations, helping organize a hackathon, or more - contact the team running this project at vdhackathon@secondmuse.com.

On Friday the 16th, I presented Tor and our work with victims of abuse and stalking to around 50 people. Most of my full presentation covered the basics of Tor, a demo of Tails Live System, and then some user stories. Most of the people in the audience were already DV advocates and aware of the way technology is used to harm or manipulate others. The user stories have come from a number of places, between phone calls, email support, and actually being out in the world talking to survivors or advocates who want to help.

Afterwards, a number of people came up to me to ask about getting Tails or Tor Browser, or to simply introduce themselves. I met a cyber-stalking survivor I've only helped via email and phone over the past year or so. I look forward to doing more of these types of events locally.